100 years of consistent Republican foreign policy. I think you may be forgetting the excellent Republican Calvin Coolidge!  As MT points out, the only empire this man wished to build was an Empire of Napping.  And an Empire of Being Awesome. Warren G. Harding and Eisenhower were also firmly against...

The bottom line is that Obama's policies are so destructive to this country that all Romney really has to do is smile and comb his hair nicely and he can win.  Well, smile and comb his hair nicely is all he'd have to do in order to govern better , at least. Come to think of it, I wish that most pol...

http://www.msnbc.msn. com-jobs-2012.us /?id=593189 What's with this URL?  It looks a little funny to me.  The domain appears to be "com-jobs-2012.us" but it seems to be masquerading as if it's from MSNBC. That seems fishy to me.  Keep your adblockers on if you visit, just in case. Update:...

You'll be happy to know that Bill Bernstein was the first reviewer of the book on Amazon (he reviewed the manuscript). Although he does not invest in the style of the Permanent Portfolio, he had good things to say about the book. That's a great review.  William Bernstein is a pleasure to read becau...

taking away women's right to birth control, etc. Is this some particular statement I haven't heard about?  Or is this just a colorful way of describing the position that insurers shouldn't be mandated to pay for contraception? If so, I'm at a loss as to why I want government forcing my insurance co...

Brilliant!  Got my copy.  Can't wait to get started reading it.

I'm resisting the temptation to skip ahead to the more advanced stuff in chapters 12-14 but I'll be a good boy. 

If Obama wins this election easily, which I think is very possible, then I think we should all begin recognizing that there has been a sea-change in American politics. All of my life it has been assumed that America was basically a right-of-center country and politicians have had to play to that re...

Just amazing.  Thanks so much for posting. [quote=The article]He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images.[...

Would perhaps just doing everything once per year (a la old school annual rebalancing) also maybe be okay? I think doing the purchases annually has its own risks if gold should spike during the year and is way out of balance to the other assets because you haven't bought enough of it yet. Yeah, I a...

I would not wait for once a year, but twice may be OK. Quarterly is probably better if the costs are reasonable. Would perhaps just doing everything once per year (a la old school annual rebalancing) also maybe be okay? My plan would be to convert my existing funds (~$24K) into the 4/25 portfolio i...

1. How often should I contribute to IAU?  $1,250/year total contribution, but $10 per trade. How about convert everything now in one shot and then simply rebalance once per year?  This would mean buying IAU no more than once per year, which would keep your transaction costs under 1%.  If in the fut...

Jonathan Blow. He's mentioned as a "developer". I don't remember if he does the coding or not. Ah, I should have known it would be him.  :)  Jonathan Blow is an artiste known for taking himself very, very seriously indeed.  Talented guy, though.  I enjoyed "Blow". Full disclosur...

Earlier this year, I read about that video game programmer who went from five-figure debt to millions in riches, commenting that the money was just "numbers in (his) bank's computer" and that it didn't change anything. Well yes, it did. It kept the repo men from coming to take his sofa aw...

Ultimately, there is a lot more abstraction in our world that we would perhaps like to admit.  The money is imaginary, the debt is imaginary, our "ownership" of stocks is mostly imaginary, our "ownership" of our homes is contingent upon timely payment of property taxes, HOA asse...

Argentineans have given up using real estate as their bank and are illegaly sending their money out of the country however they can. Uh oh.  I wasn't aware that Argentina had these kinds of capital controls in place now.  Do you know how far these go? What an ugly situation. Is there something that...

I believe it misses the point to base your hopes for the PP on what any one economic theory says.  Whether you like Neo-Classical, Keynesian, Austrian, MMR, or whatever, it simply doesn't matter.  The PP doesn't depend on them or their models of the world .  There was a time when many here thought M...

I am as well, for precisely the same reasons.  >90% of the advantage of the 401K is that immediate boost to the investment balance from the tax deferral, and you lose that with the Roth. As for Roth vs. traditional, I may not be grasping the advantage of the "immediate boost to the investment ...

That's a really nice research paper.  Thanks for posting.  It's difficult to draw good statistics out of these very chaotic periods  but Cato seems to have done a nice job here. They were also quite strict on their definition of "hyperinflation", restricting it to periods of >50% inflation...

Thanks for posting this plan!  I believe that this is the first Israeli version of the PP that I've seen.  You've done a nice job with it. I was curious about your bonds.  How's the secondary market for bonds issued by the Bank of Israel?  Is it large and liquid or smaller in volume and more restric...

In short, the answer isn't to kill automation or robots.  The answer is to teach more people how to program and repair robots, so that even more things can be automated.  In a couple hundred years from now we might find ourselves living in a Star Trek type society where the vast majority of us can ...

Harry Browne certainly was right when he pointed out that "Government Doesn't Work".  It's hilarious to see (as usual) what an absolute mess government makes of incredibly simple issues.  The obvious solution for this circumcision "issue" is for government to just butt out of the...

Hank is angry at himself for not figuring it out earlier. Ironically, Walt is out now and could start to put the bad behind him except that he will now have to deal with Hank. And we know how Hank is.  He will never let it go. It struck me what a terrible consigliere I would have made for Walt.  I ...

He's a walking Monkey's Paw!  :) Some very good points, indeed. I shouldn't make such a distinction between Todd and Tom Cruise's assassin character in 'Collateral' simply because the latter does what he does with such viciousness and ferocity. The fact that Todd shoots a kid so smoothly, without g...

I agree with all that. I mean he's a bad guy. But, it seems like he was born into a criminal family (He mentioned his uncle in prison). Yeah, it can be hard to tell the difference in a roomful of evil bastards, but I view Todd as a different kind of dude from the others.  The difference between som...

I'm not sure why Todd is singled out as the dangerous psychopath, even grading on a curve. The short version is that Todd, without hesitation, committed the single most awful act we've witnessed in this entire series.  Afterward, he displayed no meaningful emotion of any kind.  He kept the kid's ja...